Xiaomi Mi Gaming Laptop Review

Nowadays, Xiaomi is not the manufacturer which only focus on smartphone business anymore. In fact, it has expanded the business into many markets including laptop market. It has been a year and a half since Xiaomi launched its first laptop. Now, Xiaomi has added laptop product line – Mi gaming laptop product. Today, we will test the Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop with the highest specification to see its performance.

Specification

Screen

15.6-inch 1920x 1080 60Hz IPS screen

Processor

Intel Core i7-7700HQ (2.8GHz, 6M Cache, up to 3.8 GHz)

TDP

45W

Graphics card

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB + Intel® HD Graphics 630

Memory

16GB DDR4 2400MHz dual channel

Storage

256GB Samsung PM961 PCI-E NVMe M.2 SSD + 1TB HDD

Connectivity

Intel 8265AC + Bluetooth 4.1

Ports

4x USB 3.0, 1x Type-C, 1x HDMI 2.0 port, RJ45 jack, SD, 3.5mm jack

Battery

55 Wh

Battery life

5 to 6 hours

OS

Windows 10

Weight

2.75kg; 3.4kg (with adapter)

Extras

720P Web webcam

Appearance Design

Lei Jun, the CEO of Xiaomi, has claimed on the launch event that this gaming laptop can be taken to the company. With a simple design, it is hard to recognize that this is a gaming laptop.

There is no Xiaomi’s logo or other elements on the cover of this laptop. At present, this laptop uses black and gray colors just as the Xiaomi Mi notebook pro has adopted. The previous leak suggests that this gaming laptop has a black variant, but this variant fails to be sold in the market owing to some reasons.

To provide excellent heat dissipation, the laptop comes with two fans and four vents.

This gaming laptop features a 15.6-inch IPS screen with the resolution of 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. The Xiaomi official party has claimed that this screen’s NTSC color gamut covers 72% and its maximum brightness reaches 300nit.

The thickness of this laptop’s screen bezels on the left and right reaches 9.9mm. Such bezel width belongs to narrow bezel among gaming laptops.

We use the Spyder 5 Elite to test this IPS screen. The results show that the screen’s NTSC color gamut covers around 70% and its brightness reaches approximately 296nit, which indicates that this screen has excellent performance. By the way, if this screen has the high refresh rate, then this gaming laptop will be more competitive in the market.

We can see significant NVIDIA sticker is placed in the right bottom corner. Besides, NVIDIA logo is printed on the package of the laptop. From that, we can see that Xiaomi and NVIDIA have close cooperation relationship.

The touchpad with super large size brings excellent user experience. Of course, as a gaming laptop, the touchpad still has relatively low utilization.

The hidden hinge saves space. But it depends on personal preference to judge whether such hinge is good or not.

Laptop’s body and this part use engineering plastics. It doesn’t feature the numeric keyboard. 1.8mm key travel and good rebound bring the user pleasant experience, which reaches the excellent level even among the traditional gaming laptops. One disadvantage of this laptop is that it doesn’t come with a keyboard that supports RGB backlit.

The left top corner of the keyboard comes with a key with a fan image. Once the user presses the key, the fan will work at full speed immediately, which can improve heat dissipation efficiency to some extent. The rest keys on the left side can be set up with different functions by the user. Such key design has been applied to some gaming laptops before, but it fails to have received excellent feedback from the user.

As the port layout, this laptop provides four USB 3.0 Type-A ports in total. Two USB Type-A ports are placed on the left, one is on the right, and one is on the back. It provides two-in-one earphone port, but it still reserves a microphone port for games.

The right of the laptop provides an SD and a USB 3.0 port.

Some ports which the user will not often use are placed on the back of the laptop, including an RJ45 port, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, an HDMI 2.0 port and a round port for charging.

The inlet grille occupies the half area of the whole back cover.

To provide high ventilation efficiency, no dust mesh has been designed on the grille area, which is hard to prevent dust from entering. But the grille is easy to be taken out, so it is convenient to clean dust.

This laptop will run on official Windows 10 and Office 2016.

The laptop adopts Dolby Atmos sound system, and it has two 2w loudspeakers, which enable the laptop to bring excellent volume and sound effect.

CPU benchmark

The Mi gaming laptop is now powered by Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor based on Kaby lake architecture. This chip adopts four-core, and four-thread design and its main frequency is 2.8GHz which can reach up to 3.8GHz. Although this quad-core processor doesn’t boast of performance as excellent as Intel’s eighth-generation Core processor, its performance in gaming will not be much poorer than eight-generation processor’s.

On the CineBench R15, this laptop’s multi-core score is 730cb, and its single-core score is 150cb. This result shows that i7-7700HQ has excellent performance.

Graphics Card benchmark

The GTX 1060 has got 11859 points on the 3DMark Firestrike. This graphics card that Xiaomi’s gaming laptop comes with has good performance.

SSD benchmark

This laptop comes with Samsung’s PM961 M.2 SSD. We use CrystalDeskMark to test this SSD. The result shows that SSD’s sequential read speed reaches 2987.9MB/s and its sequential write speed reaches 1257.5MB/s. From the result, we can see that PM961 has excellent read and write performance.

Game Performance

We choose three games to test this laptop’s game performance, including Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Call for Duty 14 and Tomb Raider. Under the high definition of the game, the average frame rate of the Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds reaches 71.2FPS. The whole game goes quite smoothly.

Under the higher definition of the game, the average frame rate of the Call for Duty 14 reaches up to 103.4FPS. It means that this laptop can easily handle this game.

Under the high definition of the game, the average frame rate of the Tomb Raider reaches 79.86FPS on BenchMark.

Generally speaking, this version can guarantee that mainstream games under high definition can run smoothly and bring satisfying gaming experience.

Heat Dissipation

We use AIDA 64 FPU and Furmark to test this gaming laptop. Under normal mode, the keyboard’s highest temperature reaches 54 degrees and the high-temperature area is in the middle of the keyboard. The laptop’s whole heat dissipation reaches middle level.

After pressing the key with a fan, the laptop’s heat dissipation condition has been greatly improved. But in the meantime, the noise becomes louder. As a whole, the laptop has excellent heat dissipation, but the keyboard’s heat insulation should be improved.

During the test, the CPU’s frequency keeps around 2.85GHz, which means it has good performance.

Hardware Upgrade

It is easy to disassemble this Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop. All you need to do is to remove screws and then the back cover can be removed. The laptop comes with two metal fans and four vents. As for hardware expansion, it provides two M.2 ports, two memory slots, and a 2.5-inch HDD. But one thing needs to mention: the second M.2 port can be utilized only when the reservation for a 2.5-inch HDD is removed.

Summary

As a new gaming laptop brand, Xiaomi has done a good job. After all kind of tests on it, we find that this Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop does have good performance. This laptop has good craftsmanship and considerate internal design. The gaming laptop has excellent gaming performance and satisfying heat dissipation effect. Besides, the brief appearance design makes this laptop highly distinguished from other gaming laptops. The only disadvantage is that it isn’t powered by Intel’s eighth-generation Core processor. But in fact, this doesn’t influence user’s gaming experience since the seventh-generation Core processor can fully meet user’s requirement on the game.